


Insurrectum

by rillrill



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Careers (Hunger Games), Drug Abuse, F/M, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Military, The Revolution Will Be Televised, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 08:09:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Insurgo, insurgi, insurrectum: to rise up, rebel, revolt.</i>
</p>
<p>"There's no one else. No one is going to help us and we'll never be safe."</p>
<p> Twenty-four stories of the revolution that could have been, if it weren't for the hitch in the plan. (Alternate universe, where Katniss never goes to the Hunger Games. This is what happens instead.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. forever wakefulness of the weak

**Author's Note:**

> Hoo boy, where do we even start.
> 
> This is not a fic about how I hate Katniss, blah blah blah. I don't hate Katniss! I do, however, wonder what the story would have been like had she never volunteered. Revolutions don't just spring up overnight - the war would have come, but perhaps in a different way. The impetus would have been different and so would the players. And so... here we are. 
> 
> There are SO MANY original characters here, too, so sorry if you're not into that. I tried to keep them mostly un-annoying. I have a soft spot for Careers, Victors, and brilliant-but-crazy types from the outer districts. Many thanks to [lorata](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata) for encouraging this into existence. Updates will hopefully be frequent. Cross your fingers, everybody.
> 
>    _Draw not your bow until your arrow is fixed._  
>     - Russian proverb

The 73rd Hunger Games are a decisive victory for District 7.

Rowan is pulled, shaking uncontrollably, from the frozen wasteland of the arena. Only sixteen years old, perhaps a bit too young to have killed half a dozen of his peers. But Rowan is an Escort's dream: built like a lumberjack - built like his father - with long, brawny limbs and a face that could have been chiseled out of marble in Two. Well, it now looks as though the sculptor's chisel has slipped a few times - Theseus winces as he notices the marks One Boy's knife left in his tribute's cheek and chin - but no matter, they'll remake him in no time, and he'll be good as new again by the time the Victory Tour rolls around.

He turns to the boy's mentor and flicks a piece of cotton-candy-colored hair out of his eyes. "Not so bad, Johanna. For only three years in the mentor seat, to have a victor this early is very encouraging, particularly in an outlier district."

Johanna says nothing. Which is typical, really. He notices that she's stopped drinking for the present moment, a slight improvement over the past two years, but she's never had a tribute make it this far (or even anywhere near). She's slumped in her chair, arms folded tight across her chest, chewing furiously on her bottom lip. Theseus is glad there are no cameras here, because this would not look good. 

 

*

 

Johanna is numb. Johanna has been numb for the past three years, and maybe more - she figures she first started losing her senses the second her name came out of that glass jar at the Reaping. Mackeroy had clutched at her arm, digging his fingernails into the bare flesh below the cuffs of her rolled-up flannel sleeves, an old shirt of her father's that had fallen apart so many times it was no longer worth mending. Mackeroy. She'd promised him they'd go all the way after the Reaping, now that she was sixteen and done with school, and now they'd never have the chance. He clutched at her arm as she stood frozen, but as the crowd parted, a Peacekeeper grabbed her other forearm and yanked it so hard that she winced in pain. Mack's nails dug into her skin as the man in the white helmet tugged her away, and she could see her own reflection there, scared and meek like a beaver caught in a trap. It was a dream, it had to be, in a moment she'd wake up and be safe in her bed on the night before Reaping Day with Simon and Thatch snoring in the next room.

They tugged her all the way to the stage. She stood, frozen, her eyes cast down, all too aware of the crowd's eyes fixed upon her. It fell mostly quiet again as the man from the Capitol dug into the second glass ball, but she could hear her name in whispers, echoing across the square. Johanna. Johanna. Does anyone know her? Who is that?

She crossed her arms, and as she pushed up the cuffs of her shirt again, she saw the imprints of Mack's nails, half-moon marks in her flesh, for the last time.

 

Johanna has been numb for the past three years. It's a defense mechanism. Seems simple enough. Problem is, though, she can't tap out of the mentoring process like she expected to. Soon as she made it through her Victory Tour, her mentor, guy named Burke, killed himself. Didn't even have the sense to make it look like an accident. Johanna had the misfortune of walking into his house in the Village to find his body dangling from a ceiling beam.

_These things happen_ , they say. _The only real winners are the ones who die_. Everyone knows it, and they repeat it so much it's become a cliche. Burke had told her to find a phrase, a saying, anything to settle and soothe her when the violent dreams, the night terrors and visions of twelve-year-olds with swords through their bellies took up residence in her bedroom and in her head. _These things happen_ is the obvious choice, but Johanna prefers _Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck._

And when Rowan is hauled into the hovercraft, with chunks of his face missing and his hands clenched, as if he were still clutching his bow, Johanna stares at the closed-circuit screens showing the medical techs swarming around him (because they wouldn't dare broadcast this to the nation, but the mentors and team get all the gory details) and she knows this one won't be any different. What does it matter? She can't protect him any further. Whether he'll get the fits of unstoppable rage like Blight, or suffer silently, wasting away inside his own head like Burke, or simply be sold on the Underground and pumped full of substances to perform, with his family's bodies riddled with bullets because he tried to run - he's as damned as the rest of them. 

She's failed again. She has no choice. Every year, she's going to have to watch them die, because this new way isn't any better. 

The rage, the need for vengeance and justice, pools low in her belly and she wants to scream, but she doesn't. She's always screaming inside her head. It's best that no one can hear her. 

 

That night, when Finnick raps on her door, two quick knocks and then a pause and a third, she lets him in without hesitation. There are cameras everywhere, even in the mentors' quarters, but fuck it, if the audiences want a little post-Games gossip while the newly-crowned Victor is still knocked out on morphling while the med techs sew his torso back together, let them have it. They sit on the couch, a bottle of liquor between them, passing it back and forth as they say nothing at all.

Later, there will be a time for coded messages and doublespeak and the careful relaying of precious information. He drops a slip of paper on the table with a date and she memorizes it fully before ripping it into confetti. But now, they drink, and she folds her arms and digs her fingernails into her own skin, and stares at the marks she leaves there, wishing with the tiny shred of her mind still capable of making wishes that the past three years had all been a dream.

There are no dreams in this life, only nightmares.


	2. dangerous books

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is nothing more dangerous than an idea.

In Four, everything smells like salt.

The briny sea air is almost overpowering at times. The fish smell is present, too, but not so much as the salt. In leaner years for fish, the balance they've all grown up with, of salt and fish and sometimes the rotting scent of a dead whale that washes up on the beach and can be smelled a mile inland - that balance is gone. Nowadays, it's mostly salt, so strong you can taste it during a storm.

Fish have become less and less plentiful over the past fifty years. Some of the elder fishermen have postulated that in another hundred years, they might be gone completely. There are still shellfish, clams and mussels along the beaches, but the tuna and whitefish they've lived on for ages are becoming less plentiful almost by the year.

Havilah rises, early in the morning, as early as she always has. There's work to be done, even if she doesn't earn a wage - doesn't have to, the Capitol is honor-bound to take care of her for as long as she may live. She ties her hair out of her face with her left hand. What remains of the right one hangs limply at her side.

She doesn't remember the last day and a half in the Arena, the spider mutts attacking and mangling half her right arm. She's seen the footage, of course, at her ceremony and later, every year she's mentored, tied up in the neat little presentation package used to introduce her before an interview segment. Yet none of it seems familiar - clawing her way out of the ravine, massive spiders the size of dogs with fangs and pincers nearly engulfing her as she went. She has no memory of hurling the full weight of her body against the boy from Six, sending him into the ravine himself. She certainly doesn't remember the final hours she spent, shaking and convulsing in a rock overhang, waiting for death.

But death never came. The hovercraft rescued her after what was left of the Career pack stumbled through what they thought to be a harmless patch of briar, but turned out to be a lethal plant with poisonous thorns. They were dead within minutes and Havilah - nearly unconscious and with a discolored yellow pus seeping from the gashes left by the spider's pincers - was hauled into the hovercraft and declared the winner of the 61st Hunger Games.

The med techs couldn't fix her arm. The injuries to her nerves were too severe, and she was left, instead, with a useless dead limb that swung limply from one side. The less said about her face, the better - the scar that stretched from one side of her mouth up to her temple was hideous, disfiguring, and made her wince every time she looked at herself in the mirror. But she had volunteered for this. She made the choice to protect the weak, just as a soldier chooses to go to war. 

There are days when her bad leg still hurts like hell. She ties her hair out of her face with one hand and putters around the little house, opens the windows and lets the salt air brush against her face as she looks outside. Beyond the gate of the Victors' Village, the sea pounds at the cliff upon which the houses are precariously perched, and she can hear the crashing of the waves as they break on the rocks below. 

There's work to be done.

She sets to her tasks, clumsily kneading dough for a few loaves of bread with the thick wheat flour the Capitol deposits on her doorstep every Monday. She soaks the week's ration of beans in an iron pot of water. She retires to her books after all this, the dangerous books that would get her shot in an instant if a Peacekeeper came by before she had the chance to hide them.

*

Annie is screaming. "I'm here," Havilah murmurs. "I'm here. I'm right here."

They take care of their own, because no one else does. Havilah has heard all about what happens to the others, the victors who come out of the arena of sound mind and able body. Unspeakable horrors for some, to be sure, but she somehow doubts that Snow's pretty little playthings have worse than her kind. She has little patience for the victors who complain about being pampered and treated like celebrities in the Capitol. Would they prefer her life, being shunted aside and discarded like a broken toy? Given the option, would they choose to receive only a slightly larger-than-average supply of grain and flour instead of regular, sumptuous meals at the President's manor? Would they all choose to be forgotten?

She never had a sister until Annie came to live in the Village. She knows Finnick well, knows he cares for Annie very much, but how much can he love her when he's not the one who hears her scream in the middle of the night? How much can she mean to him when he leaves her alone for weeks at a time? She takes care of the girl, kisses her temple and whispers soft things in her ear and holds her hand until she falls asleep. She takes care of Annie and she does her work, and she reads her dangerous books full of dangerous ideas about war and rebellion. She lives quietly and watches the rest of the District struggle against the tide of empty nets and weak catches, and she is alone. 

They're all alone, really.

 

*

On Reaping Day, she stands onstage with the rest of the victors, watching the district's children file into the square. The Capitol sends a prep team to the Village every Reaping morning, making sure they'll all be presentable for the cameras, and a silly woman in a blue wig drapes a shawl over Havilah's right shoulder, "to hide that awful arm." It's far too warm for shawls or scarves. Mags gives her a knowing look and a small smile. Bracken rolls his eyes, looks straight ahead, doesn't offer anything to the cameras, his weather-beaten face belying nothing - but he was Havilah's mentor, and she knows him better than anyone. Finnick holds Annie's hand, squeezes it tightly. 

They're all alone, but not when they're together.

She catches the eye of the Program's Head Trainer several times during the ceremony. Linder is tall and sharply-drawn, with calloused hands and broad shoulders that would suggest hard manual labor if it weren't for the fact that his skin is pale instead of tanned or freckled. She remembers her six years of training under his watch, hours of practice after school and returning home at night to a cold dinner covered on the kitchen table. He gives her a meaningful nod but doesn't smile. It has always been this way. Almost approving, but not quite.

She's heard that Linder is sympathetic to the revolutionaries, but she doesn't know that she trusts him.

*

She doesn't mind mentoring as much as the others, even though in the two years she's done it, she hasn't been successful. It's painful, of course, but the kids like her. They respond to her. She speaks to them warmly, doesn't make promises but tells them everything she knows. 

"I think it helps that you didn't have to kill anyone to actually win," Finnick remarks on the train that evening, after she's just ushered two terrified sixteen-year-olds into the dining car to eat what will probably be one of the final meals of both of their lives.

"I killed the others, though," she says, taking a seat on a couch and pulling her legs up underneath her. On the screen opposite the couch, replays of the Reapings are being broadcast already. "Three or four of them. Don't think I don't remember."

"Of course," Finnick says as he joins her on the couch, his eyes fixed on the screen, where a twelve-year-old from Nine is bawling his eyes out as two Peacekeepers pull him forcefully onto the stage. "But you weren't - you didn't - I mean, you won because you were able to survive, not because you were able to kill. It's different to them."

"Mm." She glances at him from the corner of her eye, but he's still staring at the crying child onscreen. "Do you think it's wrong that we train them, though? I mean - I know neither of us would be here if we hadn't trained. But I just - sometimes I wonder -"

Finnick turns to her, an uncharacteristic fire in his eyes. "No," he says. "It isn't wrong. And if they stopped the program, what good would that do? You want to send these kids in there to die completely unprotected? Want to give One and Two an open field here?"

"Of course not," she snaps back. "Don't forget, it was a Two who gave me this." She gestures to the scar across her face. "But I look at these kids from the outer districts, and I don't... I don't know."

Finnick shakes his head. "You can't start thinking like this," he says gravely. "The program has its purpose. And you know that in One and Two, they send their wash-outs off to Peacekeeper training. If Four gets invaded..." He leaves the thought unfinished, but she can pick up the thread.

If the Capitol invades Four, those trainees will be on the front lines. 

She swallows hard and focuses back on the Reaping coverage.

*

Mentors have it easy, in a certain sense. After one's tribute dies, they are permitted to return home to their district and not required to stay in the Capitol until the end of the Games. But Silas from Eight has more books for her, disguised as a set of cookbooks (she'd be shocked if he'd ever cooked a day in his life). She savors the names, foreign as anything else: Danton, Jefferson, Marx. Silas invokes these names during their meetings; he tells her everything he can about what the Insurrectum has planned. "I know you can't join us in person," he says quietly. "It would attract too much suspicion, especially to have you and Odair both disappearing to the same places at the same time. But I'd rather have you than him, frankly."

Havilah smiles. Silas throws back the last of his whiskey and drops the glass back to the table with a thud. "I should go," he says abruptly. "Somebody's got to be watching me. They're always watching."

"Be careful getting back," she says. "Send my regards to Chaff and Haymitch."

"As always."

He leaves the Four mentor quarters and she runs her fingers down the spines of the books he's left her. 

*

The Games run shorter than usual this year. No spectacular upsets to be had. Winner is a One, some brawny blonde kid who'll undoubtedly be appearing in advertisements for tooth-whitening procedures within the year. She's always hated the way One names their kids. 

She's alone on the train home. Finnick is staying in the Capitol, on "official business" of some kind or another. She doesn't inquire further as to specifics. 

The train is too silent. When she walks through the door of her home, it's oppressively quiet as well.

It's only then that she makes the realization. She's left Silas' dangerous books in the Training Center apartments.


End file.
